All Life Is Problem Solving

Many progressives, even though they’ve been working for a PO-based health care reform bill, have 1) never given up Medicare for All as the goal of their activity, and 2) decided, in the first quarter of 2009, that Medicare for All could not pass the new Congress. They then reacted to their realization by concluding […]

[Read more →]

The politics of health insurance reform is a great example of reflexivity. Reflexivity is the idea that acceptance and assertion of our beliefs about reality, has an effect on how we act, which, in turn, has an effect on reality, and to some extent creates it; and, equally, reality influences what we think about it […]

[Read more →]

In this blog I continue my discussion of reflexivity by clarifying the differences between sequential and simultaneous reflexivity. If reflexivity is sequential, then the effects of our actions on the world and on our thinking at a later time, that is, “the interference” is sequential. Specifically, we cognize and come to an understanding of situation […]

[Read more →]

George Soros has written a number of very interesting and influential books over the past 20 years including, among others: The Alchemy of Finance, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, The Age of Fallibility, and The Crash of 2008 and What It Means. All of these present and apply a conceptual framework he has worked with […]

[Read more →]

During a discussion in the act-km group, Neil Olonoff expressed his distaste for the phrase “knowledge processing,” which I use frequently as a summary term for the activities in the second tier of the three-tier model of KM. In reply, I said that I’m not constitutionally wedded to the phrase “knowledge processing,” that the phrase […]

[Read more →]

Yesterday, I offered a high-level case for Federal Knowledge Management. But I did oversimplify things a bit, to keep my post short. The complication I didn’t want to introduce earlier is the idea that Knowledge Management already exists in every locale within the Federal Government, whether we think it does or not, and whether we […]

[Read more →]

More on ideas from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (NNT) The Black Swan today, including discussions of the Lottery Ticket and Ludic fallacies, Mandelbrodtian Randomness, and Gray Swans, and the Narrative Fallacy. The Lottery Ticket Fallacy. One of the things NNT calls attention to is the possibility and advisability of living one’s life in such a way […]

[Read more →]

In this post, I’ll continue my discussion of key ideas from Taleb’s The Black Swan, with an examination of: the fallacy of silent evidence, confirmation error (or platonic confirmation), epistemic arrogance, and future blindness.

[Read more →]

There’s a good reason why The Black Swan is a best seller. It’s written in a very lively style with great narratives, literary images, and vivid terms and phrases. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT) talks about scalability, non-scalability, Extremistan, Mediocristan, the fallacy of silent evidence, confirmation error or platonic confirmation, epistemic arrogance, future blindness, the lottery-ticket […]

[Read more →]

One reason why I haven’t blogged in the last week or so, is that a very active discussion about the Federal KM Initiative has been going on in the new FedKM google group. At one point in the discussions I had occasion to offer a first crack at an elevator speech for the Federal KM […]

[Read more →]